A sunny afternoon in Arizona is the perfect setting for The SRP Garage Band Competition. Held at the Desert Ridge Marketplace, the competition is for local bands whose members are in high school or college, with the grand prize being a spot at the Circle K Tempe Music Festival, opening for John Mayer.

The competition is in a series of rounds, with six bands performing at each round. In addition to the spot at the music festival, the winners get a SRP-sponsored scholarship and a bunch of Fender ® equipment in honor of Fender’s 60^th anniversary.

Featured in this clip are Epic Memory and the Nudniks.

In my year-plus of videoblogging, my best coup is the footage in this clip--the Chinese national baseball team as they prepare for the World Baseball Classic. The team is very quietly training in Scottsdale under the tutelage of Jim Lefevbre, former LA Dodgers player and ex-manager of the Mariners, Cubs and Brewers. Lefevbre will manage the Chinese national team in the WBC; a team from Taiwan also will be represented in the classic. The teams from the Asian region will play their first round in Tokyo.

This is the first of a long series of World Baseball Classic reports, running through the finals in San Diego. The teams from South Africa, Mexico and USA will train in Scottsdale; the fourth team in the Arizona region, Canada, will train in Florida (they are being hosted by the Toronto Blue Jays) before heading here the first week of March for games at Scottsdale Stadium and Chase Field.

The most humorous thing about this clip is that my producer and I had to walk across an active driving range to get to the practice field. Luckily, John Daly was not on the range at the time.